Matt Johnson Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

The The have announced details of a new UK headline tour, set to take place in 2024. Find ticket details below.Kicking off next September, the live shows will mark the band’s first since their hugely successful ‘The Comeback Special’ world tour in 2018.

Love Me,” from filmmaker duo Sam and Andy Zuchero, received the juried feature film prize from Sundance Institute and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s joint Science-in-Film initiative at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. The prize is awarded to a film that focuses on science or technology as a theme or depicts a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character.

The 2024 Sundance Film Festival has set 16 alums from past editions to serve on its Competition Jury, also announcing the set of five set as jurors for the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize.

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the year’s most talked-about scripts continues with BlackBerry, a biopic of sorts charting the rise and fall of the OG smartphone.

Amber Dowling “BlackBerry” was never supposed to be two things. Yet when the three-part miniseries telling the metaphoric rise and catastrophic fall of the BlackBerry debuts on AMC on Nov. 13 (having premiered on CBC and CBC Gem on Nov.

EXCLUSIVE: The Renny Harlin action thriller The Bricklayer, starring Aaron Eckhart (The Dark Knight) and Nina Dobrev (The Vampire Diaries), has been picked up by Vertical for a day-and-date release in the U.S. early next year.

EXCLUSIVE: Longtime IFC Films and Cinetic Media PR colleagues Laura Sok and Kate McEdwards are launching new PR and strategy firm, Track Shot.

EXCLUSIVE: CAA has signed Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller, the filmmaker collaborators behind the acclaimed dramedy BlackBerry, which made its domestic premiere at SXSW after world premiering in competition at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.

Matt Johnson’s film BlackBerry about the rise and fall of the world’s first smartphone passed $1.7 million its second week out with an estimated three-day gross of $525k in 595 theaters.

In a rare weekend with fewer new studio wide releases, IFC Films had a one-two punch at the box office with Matt Johnson’s film BlackBerry grossing $473k nationwide in 450 theaters, for a U.S. per theater average of $1.05k and cracking the top ten on Friday. It will gross an estimated $740k in North America this weekend, with Elevation Pictures handling Canada.

Matt Johnson is keeping it simple.

EXCLUSIVE: In competition, Amazon Studios is in final talks for the package The Pick Up, with Eddie Murphy eyeing to star and Tim Story attached to direct. John Davis and John Fox will produce through his Davis Entertainment banner. Murphy and Charisse Hewitt-Webster are also in talks to produce through Eddie Murphy Productions, and Story will also be producer.

Charna Flam The so-called “crackberry” is back. IFC Films has released the first official trailer for the upcoming comedy-drama film, “BlackBerry,” which provides a peek into exactly how the handheld device revolutionized the cell phone industry. Director Matt Johnson, along with co-screenwriter Matthew Miller, adapted Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry” for the big screen. Johnsonplays BlackBerry co-founder Douglas Fregin in the film, alongside Glenn Howerton as chair and co-CEO Jim Balsillie, Jay Baruchel as co-founder Mike Lazaridis and Cary Elwes as Palm CEO Carl Yankowski. The cast also includes Saul Rubinek, Michael Ironside, Rich Sommer, Michelle Giroux, Mark Critch and SungWon Cho.

The new trailer for “BlackBerry” tells the tale of the nostalgic phone invented in Waterloo, Ontario, that revolutionized the world and the story of the two men who brought its tech domination to fruition before its eventual demise.

On paper, the idea of a film about the rise and fall of the BlackBerry smartphone sounds dull as hell. A few Canadians get together, create a smartphone, and then Apple comes along and screws the whole thing up? Yawn.

EXCLUSIVE: Douglas Smith (Big Little Lies), Mark O’Brien (Arrival), Rebecca Liddiard (Alias Grace) and Vinessa Antoine (Diggstown,) have been cast opposite Amanda Seyfried (The Dropout) in Seven Veils, the new feature from filmmaker Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter).

The competition winners of the 73rd Berlinale are about to start rolling in as the festival draws to a close Saturday evening.

There is a particular kind of audacity reserved for the wealthy and the well-meaning. Multi-award-winning actor and humanitarian Sean Penn co-directs “Superpower” with Aaron Kaufman, known mostly for his commercial work and his collaboration with writer-director Robert Rodriguez.

Chances are high that, if you are reading this on the go, you are doing so on your iPhone. Apple, which first introduced the phone in 2007, now holds a whopping 24% share of the smartphone market, meaning that out of every four phones sold today, one is an iPhone.

Who knew a Canadian biopic of an infamous smartphone could be this entertaining, even poignant and moving? I am here to tell you today’s World Premiere Berlin Film Festival competition entry, BlackBerry is all that and more.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic For a hot minute, it looked like BlackBerry might control the smartphone market. They got there first, figuring out how to use the existing data network to put email in users’ hands. Sure, it all came packaged in a device as thick and unwieldy as a slice of French toast — too big for most people’s pockets, not at all comfortable to hold up to one’s ear. Still, Canada-based electronics company Research in Motion revolutionized how mobile phones worked and what they could do, making billionaires of its co-founders. So what happened? Frantic, irreverent and endearingly scrappy, “BlackBerry” spins comedy from the seat-of-their-pants launch and subsequent flame-out of “that phone that people had before they bought an iPhone,” as one character puts it. Directed by Matt Johnson — the renegade mock-doc helmer responsible for 2013 Slamdance winner “The Dirties” and moon-landing hoax “Project Avalanche” — from a script he co-wrote with longtime collaborator Matthew Miller, this sly tech-world satire freely extrapolates from journalists Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s book “Losing the Signal,” refashioning that wild ride into something that approximates their favorite movies.

The entrance and exit of the BlackBerry smartphone is truly an all-thumbs tale – that of a beloved keyboard on a game-changing wireless device, and a Canadian company (Research in Motion) not terribly dexterous with innovation after the market pie went from “CrackBerry”-flavored to Apple-forward.Equal parts high-tension business saga and nerd comedy, Matt Johnson’s feature “BlackBerry” – adapted with co-writer Matthew Miller from a book about the phone’s meteoric life (“Losing the Signal”) — parses the origins of the device’s success and the seeds of its downfall. Naturally, the story is bracketed by scrappy sorcery on one end and Steve Jobs’ competition-destroying genius on the other, but at its heart is the strange-bedfellows relationship between soft-spoken engineer Mike Laziridis (a silver-haired Jay Baruchel) and his shrewd, take-no-prisoners co-CEO Jim Balsillie (a bald, scarily fulminous Glenn Howerton).The result, at a well-paced but unnecessarily long two hours, is a seriocomic cautionary tale of butting personalities in a fast-changing world, told in a low-key, off-the-cuff observational style closer to mockumentary than recent tech-bio approaches like the flashy moral-monologuing of Sorkin (“The Social Network,” “Steve Jobs”) or the Shakespearean heft of “The Dropout.”Maybe that’s the wry Canadian sensibility in Toronto-based Johnson and Miller, whose previous two movies (“The Dirties,” “Operation Avalanche”) were found-footage larks about the thrills and perils of collaboration.

Few objects hold a bigger sway over contemporary life than the smartphone. Now, the rise and fall of the BlackBerry, the world’s first smartphone, gets the big screen treatment.

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International After breaking into NASA to make his last movie, “Operation Avalanche,” one would think that “BlackBerry” — a film that, on paper, sounds like a standard book adaptation about a Canadian boom-and-bust story — would be a walk in the park for Matt Johnson. For anyone else, it might have been. But short-cuts don’t compute for the Toronto-based helmer. His outright rejection of Hollywood’s camera tricks in place of a wild do-it-yourself approach has made him one of the most radical new voices emerging from Canada. In “BlackBerry,” which world premieres on Friday, Johnson tackles the story of one of Canada’s greatest modern inventions, the BlackBerry mobile phone — tracing its spectacular ascent into a global phenomenon that brought email to users’ fingertips, to its tragic downfall in the wake of corporate mismanagement and the dawn of Apple’s iPhone.

First-Look Image From Kiah Roache-Turner’s ‘Sting,’ Cornerstone Inks DealsProduction has wrapped in Sydney, Australia, on Kiah Roache-Turner’s Sting. Cornerstone is handling worldwide sales and distribution on the pic. Studiocanal has inked a deal to release in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Benelux. Additional deals include Lucky Red (Italy), Diamond Films (Latin America, Spain, Portugal), Nordisk (Scandinavia), Kinoswiat (Poland), Pasatiempo Pictures (Baltics, CIS), Karantanija (Ex-Yogoslavia), Italia (Middle East), Filmfinity (South Africa) and Terry Steiner International (airlines). The film synopsis reads: One cold, stormy night in New York City, a mysterious object falls from the sky and smashes through the window of a rundown apartment building. It is an egg, and from this egg emerges a strange little spider… Check out the first image from the pic above.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Pulsar Content and XYZ Films have dropped the trailer for “Tropic,” Edouard Salier sci-fi drama which world premiered at Fantastic Fest and will next play in competition at Sitges on Oct. 9. Penned by Salier and Mauricio Carrasco, the film follows Lázaro and Tristán, two twin brothers and best friends who are training together for the Astronaut Academy entrance tests. One day, Tristán is contaminated with some mysterious residue which makes him monstrous physically and weakened mentally. This disaster forces Lázaro to let go of how he remembers his brother and learn to love him as he is now, in a world where there is no room for monsters.

EXCLUSIVE: Genre firms Pulsar Content and XYZ Films have partnered to handle sales on the Fantastic Fest and Sitges sci-fi drama Tropic, written and directed by Edouard Salier.

Manori Ravindran International Editor IFC Films has acquired the U.S. rights to “Operation Avalanche” director Matt Johnson’s new movie, “BlackBerry,” about the ill-fated smartphone that took the world by storm in the early 2000s. The highly anticipated film, which was first revealed by Variety last month, tells the story of the meteoric rise and catastrophic demise of the BlackBerry, and stars an ensemble cast including Jay Baruchel (“This Is the End”), Glenn Howerton (“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”) and Cary Elwes (“Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning”). The pic will detail the operations of BlackBerry’s Canadian parent company Research in Motion, which was one of the country’s most illustrious and well-known tech companies before it floundered in legal disputes and eventually lost its market advantage to competitors such as Apple and Samsung. At the heart of the story is the business relationship between co-founders Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie.

Manori Ravindran International EditorBefore the iPhone, there was the mighty BlackBerry — the world’s first smartphone, which enjoyed a meteoric rise in the early 2000s only to meet a catastrophic demise.A new movie from “The Dirties” and “Operation Avalanche” director Matt Johnson, simply entitled “BlackBerry,” will detail the rise and fall of the once-ubiquitous device as its Canadian parent company Research in Motion floundered in legal disputes and eventually lost its market advantage to competitors such as Apple and Samsung. At the heart of the story is the business relationship between co-founders Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie.The film’s cast is led by Jay Baruchel (“This Is The End,” “Knocked Up”) and Glenn Howerton (“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” “A.P.

EXCLUSIVE: Screen Media has acquired North American rights to Renny Harlin’s actioner The Bricklayer from Millennium Films, slating the pic for release in theaters and on VOD next summer. The Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment company has also unveiled a new still from the film, starring Aaron Eckhart (The Dark Knight) and Nina Dobrev (xXx: Return of Xander Cage), which can be found below.

Jeffrey Katzenberg has donated $600,000 to an independent committee backing Karen Bass for Los Angeles mayor, as polls show the California congresswoman facing a tight race against billionaire developer Rick Caruso.

Rapper and actor Ice Cube’s Cube Vision has signed a multi-picture production deal with Back on the Strip firm Luminosity Entertainment, in association with 5120 Entertainment and SmokeyScreen.

EXCLUSIVE: CBS Studios has signed an overall deal with Barbershop writer Don D. Scott. Under the two-year pact, Scott will develop new series for the studio across all platforms, including drawing on his unique background for inspiration. Scott grew up in a nightclub-owning family, and his father was also a professional bowler who broke the color barrier in the PBA.

MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount want to stay in business with the Emmy-winning Antoine Fuqua and his Hill District Media banner. The executive producer of the Paramount+ drama Mayor of Kingstown has signed overall deal with the studios that will focus on original scripted and unscripted content for TV.

A serial killer, dubbed by the media as ‘The Mutilator’ for murdering and dismembering the bodies of two of his boyfriends in Sydney, is due to be released in September 2022 after his 21-year prison term expires. The NSW police, however, want 53-year-old Damien Anthony Peters’ detention to be continued over fears that he could reoffend. Trigger Warning: This story has details of  a gruesome double murder, which might be distressing to some readers. For 24 hour crisis support and suicide prevention call Lifeline on 13 11 14. For Australia-wide LGBTQI peer support call QLife on 1800 184 527 or webchat.Justice Julia Lonergan of the NSW Supreme Court heard an application for Peters’ interim continuing detention last week.

EXCLUSIVE: Oliver Trevena (Wire Room, The Plane) has signed on to star alongside Aaron Eckhart and Nina Dobrev in the action-thriller, The Bricklayer, which is heading into production in Europe next month.